How To Lose Fat and Build Muscle

If you want to know how to lose fat and build muscle, then you’re reading the right page because I’ll show you everything there is to know right now.

You see, burning fat and building muscle CAN happen simultaneously! It’s happened numerous times, it’s proven by science, and you just have to do a few important things to make sure you get the best results.

What you want to do is:

• Create a calorie deficit (you can do this WITHOUT dieting)
• Increase your energy expenditure with…
• Strength Training and…
• Cardio to help fat burning (but you don’t have to run or spend hours doing this. 4 minutes is enough!)

Here’s the method to the madness:

1. Create a calorie deficit.

What is fat? It’s stored energy! Through some means or another, either you ate too much or were eating too little (the latter being rare) your body decided “hey I better store some of this food as fat for energy later when I need it!”

So if you create a calorie deficit… while at the same time strength training (I’ll get to this in a minute)… then you can tell your body — “it’s time to use that stored energy now!”

How do you eat few calories? One way is diets — which just don’t work for a bunch of people (has worked for you before?) The other way is changing your eating habits to do intermittent fasting where you only eat for certain periods per day.

So instead of eating your 3 meals per day… or your six meals per day… you only eat for 4 hours each night. And during those four hours you can eat the equivelant of what you would normally eat during the whole day. What happens though is you get full a lot quicker and automatically eat less!

In case you’re wondering about your metabolism slowing down or losing muscle or any of that nonsense because you’re not eating every 3 hours, read my article on The “6 Meals A Day” Myth . Then read my article on The Perfect Muscle Building, Fat Burning Diet Plan…

2. Strength Training!

Here’s the key: when you reduce your calories you must also at the same time be doing strength training! Why? Because your body is lazy and when you reduce the calories in your diet it’s going to start burning some sort of body tissue for fuel (because there’s a lack of calories).

WHICH type of body tissue it burns is dependent on the activity that you do! So if you want it to burn fat instead of muscle then you need to give it a reason to keep all your muscle! How do you do that?

You start lifting weights! And then your body thinks “hey, I’m having to lift all this heavy stuff all the time, I better keep this muscle and burn off the fat instead because it’s not helping me move any of this heavy stuff around”. (Yeah your body talks like me and uses my vernacular)

So read my article on Strength Training 101 — Get strong, build muscle, lose fat to get a primer here and then get on either the DoubleYourGains  Bodyweight Exercise Program To Build Muscle and Burn Fat if you’re working out at home or can’t get your hands on weights, or do the DoubleYourGains 3-5 Beginner’s Strength Training Program if you can get access to a barbell and some weights.

Here’s where the magic happens: your body will “shift” into 1.) burning your fat for fuel for your workouts and daily life and 2.) taking the food you DO eat at night (in your tiny 4 hour window) and making the majority of that go towards muscle regrowth and repair from the strength training… so you get just what we want… fat loss and muscle building.

3. Cardio for more fat burning.

So you’ve decreased your calories each day, to create a deficit…

You’ve added in resistance training for a ton of health benefits, to build the muscle, and to tell your body to use your fat for fuel and hang on to your precious muscle tissue…

Now you add in a little cardio to get more fat burning benefits. It’s like seasoning though — a little goes a long way. You should read the articles on 5 Reasons Why Aerobics Suck For Fat Loss,  Interval Training, and  Aerobic Exercise – The ONLY 2 Times You Should Do It , for more information but the basic idea is to add in a little low intensity cardio after your weight training sessions or after your interval cardio training sessions.

And the best part? It’ll only take you an additional 4-12 minutes of cardio time if you’re doing it right.

So if you read this article then you’ll no longer wonder how to lose fat and build muscle — now get out there and do it!